The interplay of product and process in skunkworks identity work: An inductive model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research Summary The success of skunkworks often involves nurturing an identity at odds with the parent firm, which may cause de‐identification with the firm and hamper reintegration of team members post‐project. This identity work could lead to market success but organizational failure as skunkworks' members distance themselves from the parent firm tasking the innovation. To explore the when and how of identity work throughout a skunkworks' lifecycle, we studied a skunkworks at an international consumer products company over a 35‐month research window and through post‐hoc interviews some 15 years later. Using a grounded theory approach, we documented the interplay between product (needs) and process (decisions) over the skunkworks' lifecycle, and constructed an inductive model providing important insight to the micro‐foundations of the identity‐based view of competitive advantage. Managerial Summary This study examines how identity work unfolds over time in a skunkworks team created to spur breakthrough innovation. Such teams can develop a strong sense of identity that may in part involve opposition to the parent firm. While this can motivate the team to galvanize around the task at hand, such “othering” may cause de‐identification with the parent and hamper reintegration of team members after the skunkworks is dissolved. Thus, identity work within a skunkworks can lead to both market success and organizational failure. We ground our model in a 35‐month study of an international consumer products company, documenting the interplay between product (needs) and process (decisions) over the skunkworks' lifecycle. We provide prescriptions as to how to mitigate the possibility of these negative outcomes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".